QRESEARCH is a large consolidated database derived from the anonymised health records of over 9 million patients.

The data currently come from 554 general practices using the EMIS clinical computer system.

The practices are spread throughout the UK and include data from patients who are currently registered with the practices as well as historical patients who may have died or left.

Historical records extend back to the early 1990's making it one of the largest and richest general practice databases in the world.

The aim

To develop and maintain a high quality database of general practice derived data for use in ethical medical research.

Special features

• It contains socio-economic details of each patient's postcode
• The data extracted will contain no strong patient identifiers (see Confidentiality)
• Patients can opt out
• The database will be open to academic researchers with ethical committee approval
• The researchers will be provided with patient or practice level data that is required to answer their research question - not the whole dataset
• The costs of use of the data will be carefully controlled to allow the scheme to be self-funding but to allow good access to academic researchers
• Analyses will be undertaken to demonstrate the accuracy and completeness of the data and will be made available for morbidity analyses